The image processing is used in various fields of the industry ranging from high quality cameras that are used for surveillance to inexpensive webcams that are used for personal teleconferences from home, as well as in TV and mobile telephones. One important use of IP (Image Processing) is in the field of messaging such as advertising. Messages/advertisements have become an inseparable part of our watching experience; whether they are direct ones like posters of companies that sponsor sport events or indirect ones like repeated use of certain products in movies and TV programs. Companies invest a lot of money in those advertisements (in the 2008 Beijing Games, each company sponsoring the games paid an average of $72 million). Unfortunately, in many times the targets of the messages (e.g. advertisements) are not met, whether in sports events where advertisements are written in one language while a substantial part of the viewers (whether present at the event or watch it on TV) do not understand this language or the advertised products are of no interest to the viewers, or in cases where the messages relate to old or non-existing products, e.g. in repeated broadcasts of movies and TV programs. With the help of IP it is possible to solve some of these problems by modifying and/or adding to existing video signals and/or live video signals in order to get the best suited message to the viewer. In addition, video adds another dimension to the traditional messaging in the web, i.e. the temporal dimension. Due to the fact that the message/advertisement may be changed within a video signal rather rapidly, it has become possible to adjust the incorporated messages/advertisements on the fly, where such adjustments can be a matter of changes in volume, type, size, frequencies and the like associated with the messages/advertisements. In addition, IP networks enable nowadays the user to utilize the video content as a platform for inserting messages on top of or within the video signals. Several attempts to answer the needs for tailored messages/advertisements have been made in the art, and following are a number of examples thereof.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,297,853 describes a system and method for video transmission of active events such as sport events, having in the background physical images in designated targets. The physical images are electronically exchanged with preselected virtual images. This publication relies on detecting and identifying targets by using one or more of the following attributes: geometry—such as the physical configuration of billboards, texture of slogans and graphics—such as for example in posters, character recognition, field lines-which serve as references for designating free court areas, standard objects—such as backboard or basket.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,230,653 discloses insertion of a real time image in a video signal. The system utilizes a three-dimensional model of at least one target area within a site for identifying the target area within an original video image of the site, and for rendering a target image and inserting it into the target area of the video image. The model is rendered from the position and angle of a camera that generated the video image. By using a three dimensional model of the site to generate the target image, the resulting image with the inserted target material appears more realistic.
The above publications and others that are known in the art are concerned primarily in how to insert images at the background of a video signal, but provide only a partial and not a sufficiently adequate solution to one of the problems which the present patent seeks to solve, being, how to identify areas within a frame in a video signal which can be used for adding static and/or dynamic images thereat.